Hold, Tweak, & Paste

Classic Color Meter doesn't stop at measuring — it enables you to quickly tweak colors.
Need a lighter shade of your website's background fuschia? No problem. Move your cursor
over the background, select Hold Color, and crank up the brightness. Copy the color as an HTML
Hex Snippet and paste it into your site's markup.

Classic Color Meter can also perform the reverse — copy an HTML or CSS color to clipboard
and select Paste Text as Color. This fills the color aperture and enters Hold Color mode.

Features

Display Modes

RGB percentage

RGB (decimal or hexadecimal)

Hue/Saturation/Brightness (HSB)

Hue/Saturation/Lightness (HSL)

Y'PbPr (ITU-R BT.601 and ITU-R BT.709)

Y'CbCr (ITU-R BT.601 and ITU-R BT.709)

CIE 1931, CIE 1976, CIE L*a*b*

Tristimulus

Color Output

Values as text

Pasteboard image

Image file

NSColor code snippet

UIColor code snippet

HTML hexadecimal

CSS rgb()

CSS rgba()

Commands

Lock cursor position / X axis / Y axis

Adjust magnification (1x/2x/4x/8x)

Adjust aperture size

Show/hide cursor coordinates

Update preview continuously

Hold Color

Adjust held color

Paste Text as color

Preferences

Adjust aperture color

Assign actions for clicking/dragging the color swatch

Use lower-case letters for hex values

Include pound sign prefix for hex values

Show visual guides when locking cursor position

Show component sliders when in Hold Color mode

Assign global keyboard shortcuts

Move mouse cursor with arrow keys

RGB / HSB / HSL conversions

Show as sRGB

Show as Display P3

Show as Adobe RGB

Show as ROMM RGB

Display native values (for advanced users)

Convert to main display (not recommended)

Show as Generic RGB (not recommended)

Frequently Asked Questions

Why are you reselling the old version of DigitalColor Meter?

I'm not. Classic Color Meter was written from scratch and required
several weeks of effort.

Why do values not match those in my image editor?

Classic Color Meter, like all system-level color meters, only sees the values
that macOS sends to the display. These values are in the display's
color space.
As an image editor has access to color information prior to any color
space conversion, its meter may choose to display this information
as raw values in the image's color space.

For website and application development, it's recommended that you set both
Classic Color Meter and your image editor to the sRGB (or Display P3) color space.

Rounding errors occur due to limitations in macOS. Specifically, macOS may reduce the color depth
to 8-bit even when your photo software and display support higher bit depths.

That said, as long as your display uses an equal or wider color space than your camera, the
L*a*b* readout should be reasonably accurate and usable.

I'm on a 2015 iMac, why do colors in the right view appear less saturated than those on the left?

The 2015 iMac uses a display with a P3 color space, which provides deeper colors than the sRGB color space.

When Classic Color Meter is set to “Display in sRGB”, the closest sRGB color will be shown on the right.
The original screen image is shown on the left. This sRGB color represents what most Macs and iOS devices (which have sRGB displays) would see.